by S. C. Jensen
“Empty your pockets,” Oki said. “Dickie will find you a change of clothes. You get some rest.”
“Rest?” I laughed bitterly through my tears. “How am I supposed to rest when—”
“Here,” she said and flipped me a little blue tablet. It landed in my half-empty water glass with a fizzle. “Drink that. You’ll feel better when you wake up.”
I emptied my pockets onto the table and said, “Mind if I keep my SmartPet?”
Dickie’s eyes lit up. He said, “Hammett?”
Oki scanned the sphere and tossed it back to me with a brusque nod of the head.
I watched the effervescent mixture hiss and fizz and felt the weight of the last week’s events catching up with me. I drank it down and let Dickie lead the way into a set of rooms hidden behind a partition next to the workbench.
As I followed him, each step of my legs felt like kicking sandbags through water. He tossed me a set of plain black clothes, similar to what the tech-kids were wearing, and pointed me toward a bed. I changed into the new uniform, bundled up my dirty clothes, and pushed them into Dickie’s arms. I set Hammett’s sphere on the bed next to me, flicked it on, and said, “Make sure no one tries to kill me in my sleep.”
I don’t remember my head hitting the pillow.
I awoke to the sound of happily chatting voices. Hammett was telling Dickie some story about me, and I didn’t even care that they were laughing together at my expense. It felt so good to be with friends again. Without opening my eyes, I rolled over and let the sound roll over me like a warm wave.
“I’ve been trying to convince her of her feelings for him since my Mittens days,” Hammett said. “But you know how stubborn she can be when she really doesn’t want to acknowledge reality. I’m the one who has to listen to all the moaning and groaning and calling of names in her sleep—”
“What?” I said, sitting up suddenly. “Hammett shut up now or forever lose your gaming privileges. What are you saying?”
“I can’t shut up and explain what I’m saying,” Hammett said. The pig wore an identical outfit to Dickie’s, complete with pinstripe suit and homburg, except that it was pink from tail to toe. Hammett’s eyes rolled toward Dickie and it whispered theatrically, “You see what I mean?”
“How did you even turn it on?” I whirled on Dickie.
“You did,” Dickie said. “I think you were half asleep when I asked, but you signed so Hammett could keep me company.”
“Traitor,” I said to the pig.
“It’s okay, Bubs,” Dickie said, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the sleeping bunk unit with Hammett perched in his lap like a fashionably disfigured lapdog. “The whole vibe between you and Tom is obvious.”
“There’s no vibe, Dickie.” I swung my legs out of bed and rubbed my face vigorously with my hands, trying to get the last of the sleep aid out of my brain before getting into an argument about my love life, or lack there-of. “We were partners. We may have had too much to drink and gotten too friendly a few times, but that’s my old life. I didn’t even talk to him for a year after my accident.”
“It’s true,” Hammett said. “She punished him with silence and pined for him secretly instead.”
“Isn’t there a non-disclosure agreement you’re violating right now?” I threw a lumpy pillow at the pig. It flew through Hammett’s holoskin and the nanoparticles dispersed. “You’re supposed to be a therapy pet. I’m supposed to feel safe telling you my deepest darkest secrets.”
Hammett re-formed instantly and said, “There is a non-disclosure agreement, which you declined on the basis that ‘Feelings are stupid and I—that is you—refuse to have them.’”
“Well stop,” I said. “I don’t need any more reminders of all the ways I’ve screwed up my life, thank you very much. Do I need to remind you where Tom is right now?”
The smirk dropped off Dickie’s face. “We’re going to get him back, Bubbles.”
“So Oki has decided I can keep my head?” I said, and dragged myself off the bed. “I don’t know if I’m relieved or not.”
“Come on, cranky pants,” Hammett said. “Let’s hash it out over coffee and doughnuts. You’ve got the low-blood-sugar blues.”
I gave Dickie a hand up off the floor and followed the pig out back into the main room. The sweet, bitter scent of strong coffee and vanilla creamer wafted down the corridor toward me. I hopped over Hammett and raced to the kitchen. Sal was adding whipped topping to a tray of coffee mugs big enough to swim in. A Kreme Kween pastry box sat in the middle of the burned table with its lid propped open tantalizingly to reveal dozens of bubble-gum-pink sprinkle doughnuts.
“Oh My Holy Origin,” I said through the saliva pooling in my mouth. “Are these fresh? I have never been so happy to be alive.”
“Oki said you’d be up in half an hour, so Sal sent Cookie out for breakfast,” Dickie said, wrapping an arm around my waist in a quick hug. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
The hug turned into a stretch, and he snatched the first sticky pink pastry out of the box. I slapped his hand and grabbed one for myself. “Nice to be loved.”
“He never gets doughnuts for me.” Dickie pouted with a skim of pink frosting on his upper lip.
“You don’t get hangry like she does.” Sal pushed me into the booth with one big hairy paw and delivered my coffee with the other. He’d even sprinkled the coffee with pink sugar. I licked the swirl off the topping and closed my eyes to savour the sweet, creamy perfection.
“Real cream?” I could have kissed him, missing teeth and all. Space travel could suck it. Nothing beat Terra Firma for questionable dietary choices.
Hammett stared pointedly up at me from the floor, pink ears twitching through the homburg. “Would you like me to scan that and add it to your daily caloric intake?”
“Not even your passive-aggressive diet shaming can get me down off of this cloud, pork chop.” I shoved the last of the doughnut into my mouth and licked the explosively sweet icing off my fingers. “Log it to your heart’s content.”
Hammett gaped at me in abject horror. “Would you like me to add the viral and bacterial profile you just ingested by licking your fingers?”
“Will any of them give me superpowers?” I said.
“Does being able to defecate through the eye of a needle count?”
“Look, Ham,” I said, and relished the feeling of caffeine in my bloodstream. “I haven’t survived this long in the Grit by having a delicate constitution. Keep your negativity to yourself.”
“I’ll keep it on file,” Hammett said. “Just in case.”
“Whatever makes you feel useful.”
Dickie grabbed a second doughnut and turned it around in his hands as if checking for a label. He said, “I’m kind of curious.”
“That way lies heartache and disappointment, Dickie. I advise against delving into the eldritch practice of nutritional analysis. It will have you kneeling at the altar of horrors such as faux-meat sausages, green protein, and fat-free snack foods.”
“Sacrilege,” Dickie said, and stuffed the entire pastry in his mouth. A ring of pink icing stuck to the scant hairs on his upper lip.
“You both disgust me,” Hammett said. “If Rae were here, she’d see logic.”
The mouthful of sugar turned to dust on my tongue. Here I was joking with Dickie about junk food when Rae and Tom were fighting for their lives. I forced myself to swallow what was left of my breakfast and turned to Sal. I said, “So what’s the plan?”
Only then did I notice that the room had been completely cleared out. The workbench was bare of electronic gizmos. The tech-whiz kids were nowhere to be found. The weapons rack that had held Sal’s antique collection was strung up with the few articles of clothing I’d had stuffed in my backpack. Gore’s body bag was gone.
“After breakfast, we go,” Sal said. He rolled his
coffee mug between his huge palms and looked a bit forlorn. “Cookie stay to watch bar. Not so many feeders come back since we start make gator chow.”
“There was one while you were sleeping,” Dickie said. “Probably he’ll be the last.”
My breakfast churned in my stomach. “You didn’t really chop him up for the gators?”
“Nah,” Sal said. “Oki not let me. She has other plans for this one.”
“She used the tracer you were carrying to tag him after Cookie knocked him out,” Dickie said. “Don’t ask where she put it. That guy is going to be sore when he wakes up.”
I winced. “Will that work? Will it stop whoever was after me from coming here?”
“I have many hopes,” Sal said. “But we protect ourselves too. Base is moved, passages locked down. My girls are fed. You fatten up and we go.”
I ate the rest of my doughnut without tasting it and washed it down with lukewarm coffee. After the last vestiges of sleep had cleared from my brain and the reality of the situation sank in, I couldn’t muster my earlier enthusiasm. When we got up from the table, Sal tossed Dickie and me a bag of supplies and motioned us over to the kitchen.
He opened the oven door and pointed. “Get in.”
“Is there a tunnel in there?” Dickie laughed nervously. “Or am I getting roasted for the gator girls?”
I peered inside the oven. A round hole sat in the bottom, where the heating element should have been, and a ladder descended into the darkness. I said, “You aren’t going to fit in there, Sal.”
“You go,” Sal said, and he passed me a small handgun—the old-fashioned-gunpowder-bullet kind, not the blow-your-arm-off-with-plasma-discharge kind. “Oki will meet on other side. I have couple things to wrap up here first.”
I checked the safety and tucked the gun into the holster inside my jacket. The outfit borrowed from Oki’s unit had more tactical straps, pouches, and zippers than anything the HCPD had issued me, yet it was surprisingly flexible and comfortable. I wondered what kinds of mischief the whiz kids got up to in their spare time.
“Where are we going?” Dickie said, still standing back reluctantly.
“Come on, Ham.” I picked up the SmartPet’s sphere and stuck it in my pocket, but I left the feed on so the pig could communicate. Hammett had always loved being a voyeur in the city’s grittier locales. “Let’s do some sightseeing.”
“I’m not really up for un-chaperoned sewer exploration,” Dickie said.
“You won’t be un-chaperoned,” I said. I grabbed onto the top of the stove and slid my legs inside the oven. “I’ll be with you.”
“And me!” Hammett piped up from my pocket.
“Didn’t you almost get eaten by a gator last time?” Dickie’s voice trembled.
“Follow tunnel,” Sal said. “Stay away from water. You be fine, okay?”
As I descended the ladder, I said, “Don’t be taking any stupid risks on my account.”
Sal reached into the oven and ruffled the hair on top of my head. He grinned toothlessly at me. “Life one big stupid risk, yeah? Is good fun. See you soon. Okay.”
Okay. It wasn’t a question, it was a farewell.
Dickie scooted into the oven after me, and we climbed down into the inky darkness of the tunnel. Sal clanged the oven door shut. The sound echoed strangely in the sealed space. I flicked on my finger light and scanned down the length of the ladder.
“Almost there, Dick,” I said. I climbed the rest of the way down and landed in a shallow puddle of what I hoped was just water. The smell in the tunnel left a few other possibilities to the imagination. I wrinkled my nose and resisted the urge to have Hammett scan for confirmation. “Any idea what the plan is once we get out the other side?”
“Oki went through the documents you got from LunAstro.” Dickie puffed his way down the ladder. He hung from the last rung as if trying to convince himself the ground wouldn’t jump up to meet him. Then he landed in the puddle next to me.
Except he landed on his behind with a tragic whimper.
I gripped his forearm with my upgrade and hauled him up out of the water. “And what,” I said. “She feels inspired?”
“There was some really creepy stuff in those reports, Bubs,” Dickie said. “Did you read all that?”
“The organ grinder materials?” I asked. “I scanned it. I saw a lot of that kind of thing when I was on the force.”
“I had no idea it was that bad,” Dickie said. “And I thought the PornoPop industry was a dangerous gig.”
I rolled my eyes. “It’s probably worse for the performers than for the heir to the Triple X Empire, Dickie.”
“I did get kidnapped, you know.” Dickie brushed at the slime on his pinstripes then crossed his arms over his chest. “And I’m not the heir anymore. As far as I know my parents disowned me when I failed to attend the last strategy meeting.”
I shone my light into the tunnel ahead of us and then swung it behind us. It stretched as far as the light reached in both directions. I said, “The one that happened while you were hanging by your toes in a Grit District warehouse?”
“I don’t think they knew I was even missing until then.” Dickie followed my light with his eyes and added, “Which way did Sal say to follow the tunnel?”
I sighed. “He didn’t.”
“Oh,” Dickie said, his voice strung as tight as a pro skirt’s date schedule. “Well that’s alright. We’ll just pick one and if we don’t get eaten by a sewer gator, we can try the other way. No problemo.”
“What do you think, Ham?” I said. “Can you tell which way is the closest to the exit?”
“Sorry,” Hammett said. “My long-range feeds are all scrambled down here.”
“No, no, no.” Dickie squeezed his eyes closed and shook his head. “Nonononono. Nope.”
I flicked him in the ear. “Stop that.”
“It’s dark down here,” Hammett said. “Are there really alligators? My records show they’ve been extinct since O.E. 2137.”
I swung the light to the left, where the floor seemed to slope slightly up toward the roof of the tunnel. Ignoring the pig, I said, “I’m going this way. Higher and drier. Stay close.”
Condensation dripped from the ceiling and landed around us like intermittent rain. In the centre of the tunnel, a thick black river of slow-moving water ran beside us. Chunks of garbage floated along the surface and occasionally the slick black head of a rat broke through, beady eyes peering, and disappearing again as if the rodents monitored our progress.
I’d heard of people hacking into animal brains to use them to do all kinds of things, and a part of me wondered. But there was a fine line between rational caution and don’t-trust-the-rats paranoia. I decided to ignore the vermin and focus on getting us out of the tunnel. If we came out in the wrong spot, Oki might not be there, but at least Dickie and I could find somewhere to lie low until we got a hold of Sal again.
A sour, earthy smell wafted through the tunnel, but it didn’t have the carnal stench of open sewer or the gator feeding grounds. I hoped that meant we were pointed toward fresh air.
“So, what’s Oki’s plan,” I said. “Did she give you any details?”
“She thought you were onto something with the organ harvester angle,” Dickie said. “Figured that’s the best way into the building.”
Something splashed in the river behind us. I put up a hand to press Dickie into the tunnel wall and shone my light on the surface of the water. Black, oily bubbles floated along on invisible currents. Nothing else moved.
“Rats,” I muttered and motioned for Dickie to follow again.
“I hate not being able to see what’s going on,” Hammett said. “Please turn me off. I changed my mind about sightseeing. It’s scary down here.”
“You will suffer with us,” I said. “It builds character.”
“I hope they are sewer gators,” Dickie said. “And not some kind of genetically engineered dinosaur mutants that Libra flushed down the ‘failed experiment’ toilet.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I said. But I kept my voice lower so I could hear the gurgling of the water better.
We shuffled along in silence for an eternity, everyone with an ear turned toward the slow-moving water. Then Hammett cleared its imaginary throat and whispered up from my pocket.
“LunAstro’s assignment was compromised,” it said. “It’s not safe to follow the original mission.”
“She’s got a way around it,” Dickie whispered back. “Whoever is going in will pose as a dead body, and we’ll call in a pick-up from one of the companies affiliated with Libra. Apparently there’s a place Oki knows where the meat wagon comes to take away problematic corpses.”
“Problematic to whom?” I asked.
“Whoever made them into corpses, I guess.” Dickie shrugged. “Anyway, this way Libra’s organ grinders take us into the building themselves and we don’t have to risk anyone getting flagged by security. They’ve got the metabolic retardant shots from Gore’s bag to simulate death, and Cosmo’s going to do up some bruising and injuries—”
“Cosmo?” I spun around and grabbed Dickie by the front of his shirt. “You brought Cosmo in on this?”
“H-he did such an amazing job on you and Rae,” Dickie said, stammering. “I thought—”
“He’s not exactly low-key, Dick. We can’t afford to draw unnecessary attention to ourselves.”
“She’s just mad because Cosmo fixed her face and destroyed her illusions of being washed up and beyond help,” Hammett said from my pocket.
“That’s not—” I stopped. Was that a splash?
Dickie opened his mouth to say something, but I wrapped my flesh hand around his face and pressed him into the wall again.
A faint ripple pulsed along the surface of the water in the river and then disappeared. I pushed Dickie ahead of me and drew the pistol out of its holster. My muscles tensed into hard knots, and it was like the skin on my entire body twitched with my heartbeat. My ribcage seemed to shrink, crushing my heart and lungs and making it impossible to breathe. I slid back the safety of the gun, pointed it at the river, and tried to take slow, even breaths. A line of triangular ridges broke the black water, arching slightly before it slipped below the surface again.